The Anchor Leg
Sep. 12th, 2011 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsol Oops, late.
The name's Troy, Troy McKee, named after Troy State which my father had loved. But the name on my locker at the fire station said, simply, ANCHOR. It was a mark of respect. Great-grandfather had been part of the ladder company in 1966 that innocently went into the basement below the 23rd Street fire, only for the building to collapse in on them. My grandfather, meanwhile, had been working a routine blaze at the Waterloo Apartments in Queens when a beam fell on him, freak accident, broke his spine – dead on arrival. And then my father, my famous father, Doug McKee, was one of the first responders during the 9/11 attacks. He had run into the south tower of the World Trade Center fifty-six minutes before it collapsed. Doug McKee was decorated for valor posthumously, having helped rescue a number of people in the minutes before he perished in the tower. Now I was a fireman too, with three dead relatives ahead of me. I was the fourth, the anchor leg. ANCHOR.
Of course, my family had been firefighters long before that. Titus McKee was one of the original members of the reorganized fire department after the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1865. Firefighting was in my blood, and I was good at it. I had my share of decorations too, and I hadn't even had to die to get them. This had, I knew, something to do with why I was sitting in the office of a billionaire.
I sat in the expensive sling chair while Terrell Rucker looked out the window. "I had family in the towers, too, you know," he said. "My uncle, Ron Shearson. That was when the firm was Shearson Hamblin, only a hundred million dollar outfit. They never recovered from the attack; got bought out. But I bought 'em back." He nodded to himself.
"So I got mine back," said Terrell, turning away from the window. "But you never got yours. Can I ask you a personal question?"
I said nothing, and Terrell Rucker took that as assent. "You miss your dad?" he asked.
I looked Terrell Rucker squarely in the eye. "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
Terrell Rucker waggled his eyebrows. "Because we can get him back," he said.
I blinked. "Come again?" I said.
Terrell picked up a stack of dossiers. "Rucker Hamblin Ross is a diversified company," he said. "We're still mostly in banking and securities, but we've made a number of interesting acquisitions. I'm very interested in cutting-edge technology. We picked up Rabbithole Laboratories in 2015, sort of on a hunch. They've paid off big-time. Here, check this out."
He passed a thin marketing brochure to me. The cover said TEMPORAL GRAFTING – EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES! I threw it back on the desk. "C'mon, man, just tell me," I said wearily.
"What we can do," Terrell said, "is go back in time. Not very far, not for very long, but we can do it. We can send a person through. We've done it twice. Very accurate spatially, fairly exact window. We can even bring things back." His eyes were shining; he was like a kid showing off his new toy.
It was too strange to believe. "Have you gone?" I asked.
"No," said Terrell soberly. "Oh, no. The regulators are being very strict on us; no joyrides allowed at all."
"Regulators?" I asked.
"The federal government is taking time travel extremely seriously," said Terrell. "Nobody's really sure what could happen if there was some kind of time paradox, so we're not allowed to do it whenever we want – only in carefully controlled circumstances. Our field tests were staged in Antarctica, in a plot of land owned by us and kept vacant for five years so we could send a man back to a place we knew was deserted. So we can't graft – that's what we're calling these visits – without the feds breathing down our necks. And they've figured out some kind of grafting detector, so they know exactly where and when we're doing it, so it's not like we could do it behind their backs, even if we wanted to, which we don't."
"What good is time travel if you can't do it?" I wondered.
"I didn't say we couldn't do it; we just have to be really careful," answered Terrell. "And in the case of the World Trade Center, if a person were to be inserted at the 30th floor at 9:30AM, there is zero chance that anybody who emerged from the building between then and 9:59AM could possibly have interacted with you. So, in this case, the grafting is demonstrably safe. We've already run our grafting plan past the feds and they've approved it."
"So you want to send me back to find my father, and bring him to the present?" I asked incredulously.
"Not just you," said Terrell. "I want you to join my team. We're sending twenty people through, each assigned to a specific target. They'll find their target, get them into the grafting harness, and bring them back to the present day. There's no paradox if they come back here. They'll have skipped through time, but they'll get to continue to live a life from that point onwards, like the heroes they are."
"So it's just firefighters you're going back for," I said. "Why only twenty?"
Terrell smiled sadly. "Well, first of all, at current costs I'll be spending something like ten million dollars per person to make this attempt. So there are some obvious constraints there. But, more importantly, it's going to be a zoo in there. If we inject too many people, nobody's going to find anybody, and it'll all be in vain. So we're being selective. And really, better twenty than zero, right?"
I nodded. I could see my father again. I had been just a baby when Dad had died.
"I've got you, right?" said Terrell, grinning. "I've got you?"
He had me.
**
The capsule was the size of a school bus balancing on its nose. The grafting team members sat strapped into their chairs, wearing the bulky harness over their turnout gear. A huge gantry had been built in the World Trade Center complex to support the capsule, which was stabilized with hundreds of cables to keep it immobilized. The arrangement of seating in the capsule was very important; the grafters were deploying onto different floors, and nobody wanted to materialize inside of a concrete slab.
"All right," said Terrell through the headset. "Everybody remember: you're going back upon sacred ground, so be respectful. Everybody else you see is going to die there. When you find your target, put the piggyback harness straps around them and pull the yellow ripcord; you'll be yanked back. If you don't find your target, pull the yellow ripcord and get yourself out of there before 9:59AM. Even if it's damaged, don't worry; failsafes will bring you back immediately. Good luck and God Speed."
There was a hum, and a loud coughing sound, and suddenly the chair I was leaning back in was gone. I crashed to the ground. The space I was in was dimly lit with emergency lighting and full of fine particulates that made the air cloudy. I picked myself up and got my bearings. I could see three other grafters doing the same thing. They were all after members of the 18th Ladder Corps, and according to the best guesses the experts could formulate after reviewing all the communication chatter from that morning, the 18th was supposed to have gone up to 30 to look for more survivors.
I turned on my spotters. Rescue gear had improved over the past several decades; the spotters could effectively look through solid walls, even concrete and rebar, to see the ghostly outlines of people. I saw my fellow grafters, looking like crosses between firemen and astronauts, picking their way through the tumbled furniture and fallen ceiling grid towards the stairs. I could see the stair tower dead ahead, and a few coughing people were slowly moving downwards. Half a floor up, somebody was directing traffic. I tapped the man in front of me on the shoulder and pointed.
They opened the door to the stair tower. The emergency lighting was still working, and the stairs were basically intact; the only thing slowing down the rescue operation here was that the fast-moving people had already escaped. Those who remained were disabled by having inhaled smoke or sustained burns, or they were old or weak or had physical disabilities. They were going as fast as they could. It wasn't fast enough, but they couldn't know that. The urge to save them was strong. I knew I could get at least one of them down the stairs and out the building in time – but that, I knew, would change history. I could take one person with me, but that place was already spoken for.
"Eighteenth ladder company!" called one of the other grafters. "Eighteenth?"
"Eighteenth here," called the guy directing traffic, shuffling down the stairs towards them. He glanced briefly at me. "Oh, hey Doug," he said, then did a double-take. He looked strangely at me. My turnout gear said MCKEE.
"I know you're busy but we got a priority order here from the chief," said the grafter, all business. "We need Handly, Brooks, Lopez and McKee. Where are they at?"
"I'm Handly," said the firefighter. He was just a kid. "Brooks and Lopez I saw go down; there's a lady in a wheelchair who they're carrying. McKee…. Well, honestly, I'm not sure." He glanced briefly at me. "I thought he was above me. We were told we could go as high as thirty-three…"
"Good enough," said the grafter. He raised his voice. "You people keep on going down. Don't stop, keep going. Help anybody who needs help. There will be assistance lower down." I understood what he was doing. What these people needed was a little order and direction.
"Handly, come have a talk with me," said the grafter. He and the kid stepped out of the stair tower to have a talk. The two other men from the future followed the evacuees down the stairs. I went up.
I searched thirty-one, then thirty-two. I shouted "McKee!" as I roamed the halls. Some areas were a mess, ceilings caved in, electrical wires sparking. Other places seemed completely untouched, as if its occupants had decided to leave early for the day. Where there were windows to the outside, I could see only blue sky; there was no hint of the conflagration going on just above us.
I climbed up to thirty-three. I met a man coming down the stairs. He was badly injured; his coat and shirt were all but burned away, and his arms must have been charred, but somebody had done a hasty but expert job of field dressing him. It looked like the sort of thing a fireman would do. I stopped him.
"I'm looking for a firefighter named McKee," I said. He was reeling, exhausted and on the brink of losing consciousness from the pain, but he nodded his head.
"McKee. Yeah," he panted. "That's what the guy's name was. Patched me up just a few minutes ago, I think. Great guy, gonna buy him a beer later. Oh crap, I'm gonna throw up." He did, retching in a corner of the staircase. I left him. He was in bad shape, but he was already dead.
I climbed. I got up to 40 before I met another soul, a lady who had been hiding under her desk and had only just summoned up the courage to come out. She had seen a fireman in the stair, she said, not too far above us. He was very rude, she told me, and hadn't stopped to answer her questions. He said he had to go up, had to help people through the flames.
Of course that was it. In this tower, one of the stair towers hadn't been completely destroyed on the floors where the plane hit. A few people made it through. My father was hoping to help some of the people trapped above the conflagration get through that gap. "MCKEE!" I shouted up the stair. His name echoed back down to me, but there was no response. I ran upwards, leaving the protesting woman behind.
I climbed to fifty, then to sixty. I thought this part of the tower might be deserted, because there was nobody on the stair, but on sixty-two I heard a few hushed voices behind a fileroom door. They were praying. I left them alone.
On seventy I felt the heat. Heat normally rises, but it was so intense on the crash floors that it was pushing downwards. I turned on my cooling unit and kept climbing. On seventy-five I could hear the crackle of flames, and the hiss of a high-intensity burn. I was starting to get tired. Forty-five floors in full gear is hard, especially with the bulk of the grafting harness weighing me down. I checked my watch; eighteen minutes. I kept climbing.
On seventy-seven and seventy-eight the stair doors were closed, but I could see the flames around the edges. The wall was starting to char, and the flames were all colors of rainbow. Hot stuff. Seventy-nine was more interesting; the door was askew in the frame, and greenish fire was peeking through at me. Somebody had stuffed it closed, and jammed it in place with a fireman's chock. Good job, Dad.
Things became extreme on eighty and eighty-one. The fire doors had been blown inwards, and chunks of the concrete stair were missing. Passing in front of the fire doors would be daunting for anybody; I could see how the burned guy got his injuries. Sheets of flame intermittently swept through the stair. In my turnout gear I was okay as long as I kept moving. There was a charred body on the landing between the two floors, but I didn't see any turnout gear, so I stepped over it.
The rest was cake. The only challenge was on eighty-three, where the force of the blast had knocked loose the door handle; a thin jet of blue flame was squirting across the landing at waist-height. I crawled under it and climbed up. Things were still hot on eighty-four, but by the time I reached eighty-five things seemed almost normal. Except, of course, for the thick smoke. It was everywhere, filling every space from a foot off the ground up to the slab of the floor above. I turned my spotters back on.
The door on eighty-six had been chocked open. I went through it. "McKee!" I shouted. "I need officer McKee!" I heard a muffled shout from elsewhere on the floor. I went to search for the source.
I ran down a hall and almost bowled over another firefighter. I could see him, but he couldn't see me well through his breather mask. "I'm McKee!" he shouted. It was Dad, just like in the photos. I stammered for only a second.
"McKee, I got ten minutes to get you out of here. Chief's orders!"
"Yeah, screw that!" Dad shot back. "There's people on this floor, and I don’t like the noises I'm hearing this building make. We gotta get them out of here fast! C'mon!" Before I could stop him, he dashed into a suite of offices. I followed him, then did a double-take at the name on the door. SHEARSON HAMBLIN, it said.
My dad ran through halls with deep-pile carpeting to a boardroom on the corner of the floor. The door was cracked open, and there was the flicker of light coming from inside it. Dad shouldered it open and ran through, then froze, shocked. I followed him in and drew up short as well.
There were two people in the room, both wearing grafting harneses, but without the piggyback attachment. One of them had some kind of fancy cutting torch. He was most of the way through a heavy-looking safe. The other one was Terrell Rucker.
"What the hell?" I said.
"I could say the same thing. Why the hell aren't you down on thirty?"
"I followed Dad up here," I replied. Dad gave me a look, then another.
"So what are you guys doing?" I asked snidely. "I don't see anybody in need of rescue."
"I guess you caught me with my hand in the cookie jar," said Terrell with the smile of a boy who knows he's been naughty but doesn't really care. "I'm just taking care of some old family business. Shearson Hamblin had acquired a majority holding in several important firms, including Tully Brothers, but they had been a bit shady about it. It was just in the form of securities and trade bills – nothing the feds would approve of just yet – when the planes hit and destroyed it all. Needless to say, even if Uncle hadn't just jumped out a window, he would have been broke – which was why he had to sell out. Ah, but if I can make an accidental find of these documents in the future, it will change the landscape of business in our time. We'll be the actual owners of Tully Isham Howery, provably so. I'll have my legacy at last!"
"You and your talk of sacred ground," I spat. "Well, I don't give a crap."
"What the fuck is going on?" Dad demanded.
"We don’t care. Hold still, Dad." I put the piggyback strap around him and pulled the yellow handle.
Nothing happened.
Terrell smiled. "Well, that's the problem," he said, pulling a needle pistol out of a holster. "This rescue operation was awfully useful as cover. The feds were aware we were grafting here and now, so there was nothing to alert them that anything untoward was going on. But now that you've failed to mind your own business, I'm afraid you and your dad both are something of a liability. I'm afraid I've disabled your harness; you're not going…."
Dad threw his fire axe. It tumbled end over end and hit Terrell's arm just above the wrist. Fire axes are heavy and sharp; Terrell's arm went one direction and his hand and gun went the other. The axe kept going and smashed out the window.
Suddenly there was a great wind. Opening the window had created a path for the hot air to escape, and there was a tremendous draft out the building. His eyes bulging, Terrell clutched at the window frame with his good hand, trying to keep himself from being sucked out.
I shrugged out of my heavy grafting harness and threw it at Terrell. The mass of the equipment was enough to put him over the edge. Terrell fell. I rushed to the window and saw him falling, his good hand trying to reach the yellow handle as he plummeted, but it was on the wrong side of his body. I kept waiting for him to exit before he hit the ground. He didn't. As soon as his harness was damaged, he returned to the future, or at least what remained of him did.
The remaining grafter was wrestling with dad over the gun. I put him in a chokehold while dad worked his body. In short order he was out of commission.
"I don't have time to explain," I said, pulling the harness off the man's body.
"That's good, because from what little I just gathered, no amount of time would do the trick." Dad pointed at the MCKEE on my gear. "You really my son?"
"Yeah," I said. "From the future. In a couple of minutes this building is going down and everybody in it is going to die." I held up the grafting harness. "This is the ticket out of here. But it'll only work for one."
Dad squinted at me. "You're little Troy?" he said, breaking into a grin.
"Yeah," I said. Suddenly, impulsively, I hugged my dad, who was now about my own age. We slapped each other on the back a few times, then stepped back and sized each other up.
"Yeah, you're little Troy," said dad. "You got the eyes. Son, you gotta take that rig and get out of here."
"No way," I replied. "I came here to get you. You're a hero, and you're third in a row, and now that I found you I can't leave you. Besides, I'm firefighter. I don't bail out when there's people still in danger."
Dad nodded. "We're both firefighters," he said. "C'mon."
We went out into the hall, carrying the rig. Dad followed the first draft he came across that wasn't leading back into the Shearson Hamblin suite. He came across a broken out window. A man in an expensive suit was gripping the window frame, staring down into the abyss, his face a mask of terror.
"Hey!" Dad said. "Get away from there, it's dangerous!"
"I'm gonna jump!" the man said. "We're all gonna die!"
"Naw, you're saved!" said Dad. I took his cue.
"Look what we got here," I said. "This is a fancy new parachute. Space age stuff. This'll get you down safe enough." Wondering, the man stepped down from the window frame and then pulled on the harness.
"Now when you go," I said, "count to three and then pull the yellow handle."
"I never done this before," said the guy, gasping with relief. "You sure this is safe?"
"Sure, sure," I said. "You got your whole future ahead of you." We marched him up to the window and basically had to push him out. He fell about fifty feet and disappeared.
"Hey," said Dad. "It worked."
"Yeah," I said, checking my watch. "Well, we got one minute."
"You did good, kid," said Dad, hugging me again. "Made me proud."
"No way, Dad," I said, tearing up. "You made us proud. You did."
The floor lurched.
The name's Troy, Troy McKee, named after Troy State which my father had loved. But the name on my locker at the fire station said, simply, ANCHOR. It was a mark of respect. Great-grandfather had been part of the ladder company in 1966 that innocently went into the basement below the 23rd Street fire, only for the building to collapse in on them. My grandfather, meanwhile, had been working a routine blaze at the Waterloo Apartments in Queens when a beam fell on him, freak accident, broke his spine – dead on arrival. And then my father, my famous father, Doug McKee, was one of the first responders during the 9/11 attacks. He had run into the south tower of the World Trade Center fifty-six minutes before it collapsed. Doug McKee was decorated for valor posthumously, having helped rescue a number of people in the minutes before he perished in the tower. Now I was a fireman too, with three dead relatives ahead of me. I was the fourth, the anchor leg. ANCHOR.
Of course, my family had been firefighters long before that. Titus McKee was one of the original members of the reorganized fire department after the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1865. Firefighting was in my blood, and I was good at it. I had my share of decorations too, and I hadn't even had to die to get them. This had, I knew, something to do with why I was sitting in the office of a billionaire.
I sat in the expensive sling chair while Terrell Rucker looked out the window. "I had family in the towers, too, you know," he said. "My uncle, Ron Shearson. That was when the firm was Shearson Hamblin, only a hundred million dollar outfit. They never recovered from the attack; got bought out. But I bought 'em back." He nodded to himself.
"So I got mine back," said Terrell, turning away from the window. "But you never got yours. Can I ask you a personal question?"
I said nothing, and Terrell Rucker took that as assent. "You miss your dad?" he asked.
I looked Terrell Rucker squarely in the eye. "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
Terrell Rucker waggled his eyebrows. "Because we can get him back," he said.
I blinked. "Come again?" I said.
Terrell picked up a stack of dossiers. "Rucker Hamblin Ross is a diversified company," he said. "We're still mostly in banking and securities, but we've made a number of interesting acquisitions. I'm very interested in cutting-edge technology. We picked up Rabbithole Laboratories in 2015, sort of on a hunch. They've paid off big-time. Here, check this out."
He passed a thin marketing brochure to me. The cover said TEMPORAL GRAFTING – EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES! I threw it back on the desk. "C'mon, man, just tell me," I said wearily.
"What we can do," Terrell said, "is go back in time. Not very far, not for very long, but we can do it. We can send a person through. We've done it twice. Very accurate spatially, fairly exact window. We can even bring things back." His eyes were shining; he was like a kid showing off his new toy.
It was too strange to believe. "Have you gone?" I asked.
"No," said Terrell soberly. "Oh, no. The regulators are being very strict on us; no joyrides allowed at all."
"Regulators?" I asked.
"The federal government is taking time travel extremely seriously," said Terrell. "Nobody's really sure what could happen if there was some kind of time paradox, so we're not allowed to do it whenever we want – only in carefully controlled circumstances. Our field tests were staged in Antarctica, in a plot of land owned by us and kept vacant for five years so we could send a man back to a place we knew was deserted. So we can't graft – that's what we're calling these visits – without the feds breathing down our necks. And they've figured out some kind of grafting detector, so they know exactly where and when we're doing it, so it's not like we could do it behind their backs, even if we wanted to, which we don't."
"What good is time travel if you can't do it?" I wondered.
"I didn't say we couldn't do it; we just have to be really careful," answered Terrell. "And in the case of the World Trade Center, if a person were to be inserted at the 30th floor at 9:30AM, there is zero chance that anybody who emerged from the building between then and 9:59AM could possibly have interacted with you. So, in this case, the grafting is demonstrably safe. We've already run our grafting plan past the feds and they've approved it."
"So you want to send me back to find my father, and bring him to the present?" I asked incredulously.
"Not just you," said Terrell. "I want you to join my team. We're sending twenty people through, each assigned to a specific target. They'll find their target, get them into the grafting harness, and bring them back to the present day. There's no paradox if they come back here. They'll have skipped through time, but they'll get to continue to live a life from that point onwards, like the heroes they are."
"So it's just firefighters you're going back for," I said. "Why only twenty?"
Terrell smiled sadly. "Well, first of all, at current costs I'll be spending something like ten million dollars per person to make this attempt. So there are some obvious constraints there. But, more importantly, it's going to be a zoo in there. If we inject too many people, nobody's going to find anybody, and it'll all be in vain. So we're being selective. And really, better twenty than zero, right?"
I nodded. I could see my father again. I had been just a baby when Dad had died.
"I've got you, right?" said Terrell, grinning. "I've got you?"
He had me.
**
The capsule was the size of a school bus balancing on its nose. The grafting team members sat strapped into their chairs, wearing the bulky harness over their turnout gear. A huge gantry had been built in the World Trade Center complex to support the capsule, which was stabilized with hundreds of cables to keep it immobilized. The arrangement of seating in the capsule was very important; the grafters were deploying onto different floors, and nobody wanted to materialize inside of a concrete slab.
"All right," said Terrell through the headset. "Everybody remember: you're going back upon sacred ground, so be respectful. Everybody else you see is going to die there. When you find your target, put the piggyback harness straps around them and pull the yellow ripcord; you'll be yanked back. If you don't find your target, pull the yellow ripcord and get yourself out of there before 9:59AM. Even if it's damaged, don't worry; failsafes will bring you back immediately. Good luck and God Speed."
There was a hum, and a loud coughing sound, and suddenly the chair I was leaning back in was gone. I crashed to the ground. The space I was in was dimly lit with emergency lighting and full of fine particulates that made the air cloudy. I picked myself up and got my bearings. I could see three other grafters doing the same thing. They were all after members of the 18th Ladder Corps, and according to the best guesses the experts could formulate after reviewing all the communication chatter from that morning, the 18th was supposed to have gone up to 30 to look for more survivors.
I turned on my spotters. Rescue gear had improved over the past several decades; the spotters could effectively look through solid walls, even concrete and rebar, to see the ghostly outlines of people. I saw my fellow grafters, looking like crosses between firemen and astronauts, picking their way through the tumbled furniture and fallen ceiling grid towards the stairs. I could see the stair tower dead ahead, and a few coughing people were slowly moving downwards. Half a floor up, somebody was directing traffic. I tapped the man in front of me on the shoulder and pointed.
They opened the door to the stair tower. The emergency lighting was still working, and the stairs were basically intact; the only thing slowing down the rescue operation here was that the fast-moving people had already escaped. Those who remained were disabled by having inhaled smoke or sustained burns, or they were old or weak or had physical disabilities. They were going as fast as they could. It wasn't fast enough, but they couldn't know that. The urge to save them was strong. I knew I could get at least one of them down the stairs and out the building in time – but that, I knew, would change history. I could take one person with me, but that place was already spoken for.
"Eighteenth ladder company!" called one of the other grafters. "Eighteenth?"
"Eighteenth here," called the guy directing traffic, shuffling down the stairs towards them. He glanced briefly at me. "Oh, hey Doug," he said, then did a double-take. He looked strangely at me. My turnout gear said MCKEE.
"I know you're busy but we got a priority order here from the chief," said the grafter, all business. "We need Handly, Brooks, Lopez and McKee. Where are they at?"
"I'm Handly," said the firefighter. He was just a kid. "Brooks and Lopez I saw go down; there's a lady in a wheelchair who they're carrying. McKee…. Well, honestly, I'm not sure." He glanced briefly at me. "I thought he was above me. We were told we could go as high as thirty-three…"
"Good enough," said the grafter. He raised his voice. "You people keep on going down. Don't stop, keep going. Help anybody who needs help. There will be assistance lower down." I understood what he was doing. What these people needed was a little order and direction.
"Handly, come have a talk with me," said the grafter. He and the kid stepped out of the stair tower to have a talk. The two other men from the future followed the evacuees down the stairs. I went up.
I searched thirty-one, then thirty-two. I shouted "McKee!" as I roamed the halls. Some areas were a mess, ceilings caved in, electrical wires sparking. Other places seemed completely untouched, as if its occupants had decided to leave early for the day. Where there were windows to the outside, I could see only blue sky; there was no hint of the conflagration going on just above us.
I climbed up to thirty-three. I met a man coming down the stairs. He was badly injured; his coat and shirt were all but burned away, and his arms must have been charred, but somebody had done a hasty but expert job of field dressing him. It looked like the sort of thing a fireman would do. I stopped him.
"I'm looking for a firefighter named McKee," I said. He was reeling, exhausted and on the brink of losing consciousness from the pain, but he nodded his head.
"McKee. Yeah," he panted. "That's what the guy's name was. Patched me up just a few minutes ago, I think. Great guy, gonna buy him a beer later. Oh crap, I'm gonna throw up." He did, retching in a corner of the staircase. I left him. He was in bad shape, but he was already dead.
I climbed. I got up to 40 before I met another soul, a lady who had been hiding under her desk and had only just summoned up the courage to come out. She had seen a fireman in the stair, she said, not too far above us. He was very rude, she told me, and hadn't stopped to answer her questions. He said he had to go up, had to help people through the flames.
Of course that was it. In this tower, one of the stair towers hadn't been completely destroyed on the floors where the plane hit. A few people made it through. My father was hoping to help some of the people trapped above the conflagration get through that gap. "MCKEE!" I shouted up the stair. His name echoed back down to me, but there was no response. I ran upwards, leaving the protesting woman behind.
I climbed to fifty, then to sixty. I thought this part of the tower might be deserted, because there was nobody on the stair, but on sixty-two I heard a few hushed voices behind a fileroom door. They were praying. I left them alone.
On seventy I felt the heat. Heat normally rises, but it was so intense on the crash floors that it was pushing downwards. I turned on my cooling unit and kept climbing. On seventy-five I could hear the crackle of flames, and the hiss of a high-intensity burn. I was starting to get tired. Forty-five floors in full gear is hard, especially with the bulk of the grafting harness weighing me down. I checked my watch; eighteen minutes. I kept climbing.
On seventy-seven and seventy-eight the stair doors were closed, but I could see the flames around the edges. The wall was starting to char, and the flames were all colors of rainbow. Hot stuff. Seventy-nine was more interesting; the door was askew in the frame, and greenish fire was peeking through at me. Somebody had stuffed it closed, and jammed it in place with a fireman's chock. Good job, Dad.
Things became extreme on eighty and eighty-one. The fire doors had been blown inwards, and chunks of the concrete stair were missing. Passing in front of the fire doors would be daunting for anybody; I could see how the burned guy got his injuries. Sheets of flame intermittently swept through the stair. In my turnout gear I was okay as long as I kept moving. There was a charred body on the landing between the two floors, but I didn't see any turnout gear, so I stepped over it.
The rest was cake. The only challenge was on eighty-three, where the force of the blast had knocked loose the door handle; a thin jet of blue flame was squirting across the landing at waist-height. I crawled under it and climbed up. Things were still hot on eighty-four, but by the time I reached eighty-five things seemed almost normal. Except, of course, for the thick smoke. It was everywhere, filling every space from a foot off the ground up to the slab of the floor above. I turned my spotters back on.
The door on eighty-six had been chocked open. I went through it. "McKee!" I shouted. "I need officer McKee!" I heard a muffled shout from elsewhere on the floor. I went to search for the source.
I ran down a hall and almost bowled over another firefighter. I could see him, but he couldn't see me well through his breather mask. "I'm McKee!" he shouted. It was Dad, just like in the photos. I stammered for only a second.
"McKee, I got ten minutes to get you out of here. Chief's orders!"
"Yeah, screw that!" Dad shot back. "There's people on this floor, and I don’t like the noises I'm hearing this building make. We gotta get them out of here fast! C'mon!" Before I could stop him, he dashed into a suite of offices. I followed him, then did a double-take at the name on the door. SHEARSON HAMBLIN, it said.
My dad ran through halls with deep-pile carpeting to a boardroom on the corner of the floor. The door was cracked open, and there was the flicker of light coming from inside it. Dad shouldered it open and ran through, then froze, shocked. I followed him in and drew up short as well.
There were two people in the room, both wearing grafting harneses, but without the piggyback attachment. One of them had some kind of fancy cutting torch. He was most of the way through a heavy-looking safe. The other one was Terrell Rucker.
"What the hell?" I said.
"I could say the same thing. Why the hell aren't you down on thirty?"
"I followed Dad up here," I replied. Dad gave me a look, then another.
"So what are you guys doing?" I asked snidely. "I don't see anybody in need of rescue."
"I guess you caught me with my hand in the cookie jar," said Terrell with the smile of a boy who knows he's been naughty but doesn't really care. "I'm just taking care of some old family business. Shearson Hamblin had acquired a majority holding in several important firms, including Tully Brothers, but they had been a bit shady about it. It was just in the form of securities and trade bills – nothing the feds would approve of just yet – when the planes hit and destroyed it all. Needless to say, even if Uncle hadn't just jumped out a window, he would have been broke – which was why he had to sell out. Ah, but if I can make an accidental find of these documents in the future, it will change the landscape of business in our time. We'll be the actual owners of Tully Isham Howery, provably so. I'll have my legacy at last!"
"You and your talk of sacred ground," I spat. "Well, I don't give a crap."
"What the fuck is going on?" Dad demanded.
"We don’t care. Hold still, Dad." I put the piggyback strap around him and pulled the yellow handle.
Nothing happened.
Terrell smiled. "Well, that's the problem," he said, pulling a needle pistol out of a holster. "This rescue operation was awfully useful as cover. The feds were aware we were grafting here and now, so there was nothing to alert them that anything untoward was going on. But now that you've failed to mind your own business, I'm afraid you and your dad both are something of a liability. I'm afraid I've disabled your harness; you're not going…."
Dad threw his fire axe. It tumbled end over end and hit Terrell's arm just above the wrist. Fire axes are heavy and sharp; Terrell's arm went one direction and his hand and gun went the other. The axe kept going and smashed out the window.
Suddenly there was a great wind. Opening the window had created a path for the hot air to escape, and there was a tremendous draft out the building. His eyes bulging, Terrell clutched at the window frame with his good hand, trying to keep himself from being sucked out.
I shrugged out of my heavy grafting harness and threw it at Terrell. The mass of the equipment was enough to put him over the edge. Terrell fell. I rushed to the window and saw him falling, his good hand trying to reach the yellow handle as he plummeted, but it was on the wrong side of his body. I kept waiting for him to exit before he hit the ground. He didn't. As soon as his harness was damaged, he returned to the future, or at least what remained of him did.
The remaining grafter was wrestling with dad over the gun. I put him in a chokehold while dad worked his body. In short order he was out of commission.
"I don't have time to explain," I said, pulling the harness off the man's body.
"That's good, because from what little I just gathered, no amount of time would do the trick." Dad pointed at the MCKEE on my gear. "You really my son?"
"Yeah," I said. "From the future. In a couple of minutes this building is going down and everybody in it is going to die." I held up the grafting harness. "This is the ticket out of here. But it'll only work for one."
Dad squinted at me. "You're little Troy?" he said, breaking into a grin.
"Yeah," I said. Suddenly, impulsively, I hugged my dad, who was now about my own age. We slapped each other on the back a few times, then stepped back and sized each other up.
"Yeah, you're little Troy," said dad. "You got the eyes. Son, you gotta take that rig and get out of here."
"No way," I replied. "I came here to get you. You're a hero, and you're third in a row, and now that I found you I can't leave you. Besides, I'm firefighter. I don't bail out when there's people still in danger."
Dad nodded. "We're both firefighters," he said. "C'mon."
We went out into the hall, carrying the rig. Dad followed the first draft he came across that wasn't leading back into the Shearson Hamblin suite. He came across a broken out window. A man in an expensive suit was gripping the window frame, staring down into the abyss, his face a mask of terror.
"Hey!" Dad said. "Get away from there, it's dangerous!"
"I'm gonna jump!" the man said. "We're all gonna die!"
"Naw, you're saved!" said Dad. I took his cue.
"Look what we got here," I said. "This is a fancy new parachute. Space age stuff. This'll get you down safe enough." Wondering, the man stepped down from the window frame and then pulled on the harness.
"Now when you go," I said, "count to three and then pull the yellow handle."
"I never done this before," said the guy, gasping with relief. "You sure this is safe?"
"Sure, sure," I said. "You got your whole future ahead of you." We marched him up to the window and basically had to push him out. He fell about fifty feet and disappeared.
"Hey," said Dad. "It worked."
"Yeah," I said, checking my watch. "Well, we got one minute."
"You did good, kid," said Dad, hugging me again. "Made me proud."
"No way, Dad," I said, tearing up. "You made us proud. You did."
The floor lurched.
